Análisis del Expediente N° 402-2015-GR.LAMB/GRTPE-SDIT

In the smart grid there are several ideas of what could be offered in terms of technology, but strong cases for their business benefits still need to be proven in practice. For SFERS not only the business benefits need to be proven, but the actual stakeholder acceptance behind the system presented in section 5.3. One way to gain some insight into the thoughts and dispositions of the consumers is through focused surveys, which constitute a practical way of gauging stakeholder expectations and inclinations and are routinely performed to this end. In the process of designing and realizing futuristic concepts that allow the prosumers to interact via smart grid services [21], a survey was conducted in order to evaluate and understand the interest, impact, and willingness of prosumers. In section B.1, the result and analysis of the survey is presented, and the insights are summarized and discussed in section B.2. As will be shown, the results can be fully adopted in understanding the existence of SFERS.

b.1 s u r v e y a na ly s i s

The analysis presented in this section is according to the methodology from [36], and aims at highlighting the key aspects that were brought to surface. For analysis purposes, the questions are divided into 4 categories: willingness to change, automated control, value-added services and privacy. Due the relevance for the thesis, following sections present only partial results of [36].

b.1.1 Willingness to Change

One of the main pillars upon which the smart grid promise is built assumes that the prosumers are willing to adjust their behaviour based on new timely information they have access to. Although this is a multifaceted problem, it is important to understand if the prosumers want to adjust their behaviour, under what conditions, and in what way. As smart grids envision highly distributed generation, the increased participation of the demand side to stabilize the grid is a highly relevant area of research [151], as it will greatly impact the way end-users interact with the grid. Understanding the willingness of end-users to transition into this new paradigm of thinking and acting in the smart grid, whether it be

responding to price signals, actively trading energy resources, or simply paying a little more to consume more “green" energy, is of paramount importance.

As the nature of the generation and distribution of electricity changes, end-users will have to take a more active role in managing their usage to manage costs and diminish their impact on the environment [94]. Part of the survey questions were pertaining the willingness of the end-consumers to change and adapt their consumption behaviour, to engage with each other to reduce costs, and to provide usage information to their retailer in order to reduce costs. As depicted in Figure 78, depending on the information they acquire, the overwhelming majority of people are willing to modify their own behaviour.

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Willingness to Modify Behavior 

Not Willing Less than Willing Willing More than Willing Very Willing

Figure 78.: The willingness of participants to modify their consumption behaviour based on external signals such as price

These are some of the key aspects of the smart grid, where people are expected to adjust their behaviour in order to assist reducing energy at peak times, as well as maximize the use of intermittent renewable energy, such as wind of solar photovoltaic. Additionally, the majority of participants would be willing to pay slightly more to reduce environmental impact by using green energy, as Figure 79 depicts. Therefore, in principle the prosumer has an interest in modifying their behaviour; however, to what extent, and by what means, needs to be further investigated.

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Would Pay More for Green Energy 

Yes No

An interesting aspect in the envisioned smart grid is based on the willingness of “prosumers” to share resources (for example, unused ones) or trade them on an electricity market [25]. The major goal here is the understanding of prosumers’ energy behaviour both as individuals as well as part of groups ( defined by social, economic, geographic, etc., criteria). The aforementioned objective may be greatly assisted by having better prediction and real-time analytics on the provided and vast smart-grid information. As shown in Figure 80, there is overwhelming support for sharing unused resources, especially if some monetary benefit can be obtained. Additionally, about 2/3 of the prosumers seem positive towards participating in shared-interest groups. This is especially interesting in the cases where service providers may act on behalf of a larger group of users (such as prosumer Virtual Power Plant [61]), and perform actions such as bidding into energy markets [23] or actively managing their participants’ energy devices according to bilateral service contracts.

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Share Resources Participate in Group

Community Engagement 

Yes No

Figure 80.: The percentage of participants that would like to engage with their community to form groups and share resources

As the smart grid is expected to be information-centric [35], one has to look at the broader picture and not only the technical information that may be acquired by the infrastructure. The increasing trend towards bilateral communication between retailers and their customers means new interaction patterns can emerge, and new approaches in handling dynamic changing situations as required in Demand Side Management and Demand Response can emerge. For instance, customers may reduce their energy costs by providing extra information about themselves, which in turn might help their retailers better assess situations and reduce costs incurred for example by forecasting errors.

The survey results as depicted in Figure 81 reveal that the majority of partici- pants are willing to provide information about their energy-usage expectations to third parties. However, only about half of them are willing to classify in detail their behaviour pattern, for example being on vacation. This seems to suggest that new tools need to be offered to prosumers that allow them to model and understand their energy usage patterns so that they may convey their usage ex- pectations to retailers without revealing detailed, privacy-infringing aspects [152].

Hence, the right balance between privacy and rich user-information provision that the smart grid promises is based upon needs to be striven towards to, and supported by, the necessary tools.

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Usage Expectations Activities

Communication to Retailer 

Yes No

Figure 81.: The percentage of participants that would communicate their activities and their usage expectations to their retailer

b.1.2 Automated Control

Although information-rich real-time monitoring of energy aspects is a key promise of smart grid, in order to be effective this needs to be strongly cou- pled with real-time control and management of the infrastructure. This will make possible large-scale energy-management approaches, as now situations can be monitored and reacted upon in much more sophisticated ways [34]. There are several promising scenarios here,for instance independent service providers would be able to remotely control household devices to curb usage in peaks times. This idea may not be new, as it is already implemented in commercial and indus- trial sectors, but applying it at large-scale residential areas and infrastructure that could not be monitored and controlled in real-time is new ground. EnerNOC (www.enernoc.com) is a good example of a company offering DR in the com- mercial and industrial sphere. It bids the energy flexibility of their customers in the energy market; whereby in some cases, its customers can generate more revenue by shutting down machinery to curb energy usage, than by continuing production.

Figure 82 depicts that the survey participants are willing to allow automatic management of devices as far as this does not affect any loss of comfort. This open the door for optimisation approaches between usage-patterns and device operation (which may lead to increased energy efficiency), effectively moving away from “one-size-fits-all” design and operational assumptions of appliances towards user-specific adaptations. However, the findings point out that people are more willing to allow their own devices to automate their energy consumption (based on external signals, such as price), than to allow external parties to manage their behaviour. This puts forward a clear message that the user wants to be in control of his own infrastructure but would happily engage to automatic control

approaches that do not negatively impact the accommodated lifestyle. Such results are of significant interest if EVs of customers are used for composing a variable storage solution, who’s potential was shown in section 4.5.

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Automated Devices 3rd Party Control

Acceptable Automation 

Yes No

Figure 82.: The percentage of participants that would like automates devices and would accept 3rd party management of devices

Interestingly, in a follow-up question “If you could trade any excess photo- voltaic production in a small market, would you be willing to allow another party to manage that task for you in the same way a managed fund might manage your investments?", 81% of participants said yes. This seems to indicate a disparity in the willingness to allow third parties control between consumption and produc- tion devices. It also suggests that neighbourhood level energy aggregators may be a viable business model for managing local energy requirements in the future. However, this reaction might also be result of inexperience with energy-producing devices and their tight integration with in-house consumption, something that has been fortified with the existing feed-in tariffs in several countries that led to users considering the energy-generation sources as a third-party infrastructure that is just co-located to their premises and hence fail to make the connection between the energy produced by such systems and their own consumption. b.1.3 Value-Added Services

As well as providing end-users with an in-depth view of their energy con- sumption, fine grained metering data together with artificial intelligence and data-mining algorithms can provide end-users with novel added-value services [38]. Such services are expected to play a pivotal role in retailer offerings, as they might serve as key differentiators between competing stakeholders. Examples of these services could be: enabling end-users to compare their consumption with that of similar households in the region, allowing the retailer to provide their customers with suggestions on how to improve their behaviour, as well as bill shock services (which notify the customer early enough that s/he is on track for a larger than usual bill), or vacation services, which allow the customer to be informed of any unexpected energy usage in the house during a period of absence, such as when travelling. Although innovative creative thinking might

come up with new ideas, in order for them to materialize one would have to heavily rely on monitoring, assessment, and management of the infrastructure, its stakeholders, and the information it holds as indicated multiple times in this section.

As can be seen in Figure 83, there is a high level of interest in value-added services such as recommendation and comparison services. In order to catalyse this process, it would be important to outfit consumers with tools that give them access to their consumption data, as well as the ability to manage it, which implies sharing it via user-controlled policy access [66]. With such enabling approaches, innovative on-line services could be created that leverage this data to create value for the customer and the service provider, much in the same way several providers operate today, for instance Facebook and Google in the social media domain. 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Recommendations Comparison Value-added Services  Yes No

Figure 83.: The percentage of participants that would like value added services such as comparison and recommendation

b.1.4 Privacy

Privacy is a key area in the emerging smart grid that needs to be properly addressed in order not to pose as a roadblock. Experience so far both on telecom- munications and Internet services has shown that value can be created for the users who may be willingly (or simply unaware of the compromises they get to) sacrifice part of their privacy in order to enjoy such services. Similarly, here the privacy concerns versus the services offered will be a battlefield, and ap- proaches that offer a user-controllable balance between functionality and (private) information provided are sought.

As depicted in Figure 84, the finding is that users may share information and partly trade their privacy if this is done in a controllable visible way, such as sharing data with the energy provider. However, over 90% said that this should be done under privacy preserving measures (e.g. anonymization, etc.). This is in line also with the interest in sharing information on social networking sites, for which most of the users do not see the benefit of simply sharing their energy consumption at the moment, probably due to absence of real value-added

applications in these. However, this lack of interest dropped to about 50% if additional benefits were given, such as better pricing or access to additional value-added services. Concluding, the finding is that while privacy is paramount, it is still negotiable; however, it is still unclear how much privacy would the participant be willing to sacrifice, and for what level of benefits [153].

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On Social Networks Share for Benefits

Privacy and Data Sharing 

Yes No

Figure 84.: The percentage of participants that would like share their usage infor- mation on social networking sites or for additional benefits.

b.2 t o wa r d s p r o s u m e r e n e r g y s e r v i c e s

The analysis in section B.1 has provided some key messages for the stakehold- ers actively involved in realising the smart grid. The need to go beyond the fundamentals, that is, smart metering and couple the smart grid with an ad- vanced energy service infrastructure, is eminent. This should not be a standalone one for the sake of the smart grid, but amalgamated with the existing Internet applications and services so can further evolve by taking into account energy information, while the traditional grid processes may also benefit from prosumer interactions at other levels. The latter holds especially true for the three directions dealing with (i) monitoring, (ii) assessment/analytics, and (iii) control, where significant work still needs to be invested.

In a more detailed fashion some of the findings in the survey point out towards the following:

I. there is a need for better and more fine-grained access to data acquired by monitoring, even down to the device layer, as already presented in chapter 3 II. although there is a need to preserve privacy, there is also the necessity of sharing information and trading part of it in order to enjoy value-added services

III. users are willing to share their energy resources with the local community, in an effort to reduce their own energy costs, e.g. by local energy trading [25]

IV. users would allow third parties to manage and trade their energy resources (solar photovoltaic panels, etc.), by forming pVPP [61]

V. think favourably of the idea of smart and self-managed devices, but are unfavourable to third-party direct control of their consumption devices These findings are in line with the findings from other surveys and reports. For instance in [66], fewer participants seemed interested in obtaining more usage information (in this case through an energy information display), and also in participating in demand response programs. However this interest is growing [28] and, as these findings indicate, goes beyond simple cost interest towards the community. In [154], the participants did not seem to have a satisfactory understanding of the electricity grid delivery, something that may be depicted also in the results. Smart appliance usage and participation in energy efficiency actions are in-line with the findings of others [66], also noting similar concerns about privacy and the appliance controlling. It is clear that multi-disciplinary research that goes beyond technology is needed, towards economics and behavioural science [154]. The final success of course is also bound to the specific conditions on user acceptance [119] in each country or region that can stipulate the uptake of the smart grid benefits [155]. Significant effort will need to be invested in modelling behaviour of prosumers [118] in order to be able to correlate it with key performance energy indicators and business scenarios of smart grids, as the main contribution of this thesis presented in chapter 5.

An interesting issue is how one should approach these findings, especially from the view of developing new applications and functionalities for the emerging smart grid. The traditional approach in the energy domain is to create monolithic applications, since usually the whole value chain, that is, the data acquisition, analysis, and partially control, were in the hands of the same stakeholder. How- ever, with the liberalization of the energy market as well as the vision of the smart grid, there are now multiple stakeholders competing in multiple layers. Therefore, integration and interaction based on the traditional models would be not only anachronistic but impossible in the future. The quest then is towards finding commonalities, such as at the functional level, that may be realized by open platforms and services and may provide various views on the acquired data and enable further composition of them to more sophisticated ones [27]. Hence, section 3.2 addresses this eminent need for the so called common energy services that can be used as a basis for future development.

As electricity gets more expensive and technologies improve, the amount of internal generation, at the household level, is likely to rise. This will create new challenges for distribution-grid managers, as the power flow will originate from several points in the distribution grid. This is a big shift from the traditional model where power flowed in one direction. The good news is, at least, that the participants in this survey are willing to share their resources for a cost benefit (findings 3,4). Providing a convincing case to the users, especially tackling the aspects of intelligent device control (self o external) and usefulness of having it as

part of a broader DR action, is a key area that needs to be addressed [151]. This also indicates that new business models [130] and services are required to enable this type of behaviour [21], so in chapter 5 the concrete capitalization proposals are made.

b.3 c o n c l u s i o n

Coupled with the deployment of AMI and the increasing penetration of RES, new services and tools will be created to ease the new level of engagement customers will have with the system [34]. In order to target such efforts adequately and